by D. W. Buffa
He looked at me, but just for an instant, and then, with a flash of impatience, commenced another circuit of the room. When his eyes came back around they settled not on me, but on Cassandra Loescher.
“You’re the prosecutor in this case?” he asked, bending slightly toward her.
Startled at first, she quickly changed her expression to one of annoyance and looked to the bench for help.
“Mr. Winston,” Judge Bingham informed him in a quiet but firm voice, “witnesses answer the questions directed to them; they don’t ask them. But, yes, Ms. Loescher is the prosecutor in this case. Now please, answer the question Mr. Antonelli asked you.
Please state your full name and spell your last for the record.”
Elliott sat stiff and straight, an imperious look on his face. He treated Bingham’s request like the suggestion of a servant: something he might listen to but would under no circumstances acknowledge. He turned to me, propped his right elbow on the arm of the chair, placed his thumb under the side of his chin, and set both his index and his middle fingers against his cheekbone. A thought raced through his mind and left behind it a smile that darted over his mouth.
“My name is Elliott Lowell Winston,” he said finally, and then slowly spelled the last.
I glanced down at the file that lay open on the table.
“I believe the next question is ‘How are you employed?’ “
My head snapped up. The smile on his face, meant to appear officious, could not quite hide a certain sentimentality nor completely mask a kind of nostalgia.
“I’m not employed. I’m a member of the leisure class, which, as you know, is always, one way or the other, supported at state expense.”
“You’re an inmate at the state hospital.”
“That’s what I just said.”
“How long have you been there?” I asked as I closed the file.
“Twelve years, five months, three weeks, four days,” he said, in a harsh, almost brutal voice. He seemed to be proud of it, and ready to defy anyone who thought to disagree.
I worked my way along the back of the table, passing the defendant—poor, mystified Danny, who seemed amazed by this strange creature on the witness chair; passing Cassandra Loescher, who, despite herself, could not keep her eyes off Elliott Winston.
“Twelve years, five months, three weeks, four days,” I repeated aloud to myself as I paused at the far side of the counsel table and looked back across the oblique angle to the witness stand.
“How have you survived it all these years, knowing there was nothing wrong with you, nothing so serious that it could not have been cured with a little rest and a little weekly counseling with a good psychologist?”
He made no reply, and I could sense that he wondered what I knew.
“We know all about it, Elliott.” I leaned back against the front of the table and clasped my hands together. “We know that Calvin Jeffries arranged to have you sent to the state hospital; we know you were sent there without a psychiatric evaluation. And we know why he did it. We know he wanted you out of the way—
in a place where you could not do anything about it when he took your wife and took your children. What we don’t know is when you first figured it out, first understood that you weren’t going to be there for just a few months. That’s what he promised you, wasn’t it? That you’d go to the hospital and with the same kind of influence he used to get you there, get you out again, didn’t he?”
Dark with rage, his eyes burrowed into me. “I always knew I could trust the honorable Judge Jeffries!”
“When did you first understand that you had been deceived, that you weren’t going to be getting out of the hospital, not for twenty years or more?”
His hand came down from the side of his face and rested on his knee. He bent forward, his back still straight, a half smile, more enigmatic than any look I had ever seen, slashed across his face.
“I understood it the first time I saw him look at my wife; I didn’t know I understood it until I had been in the hospital for nearly half a year.” Not without a certain satisfaction, he noted the puzzled expression on my face. “When I realized she was never going to come to see me; when I was sent a copy of her divorce decree; when I was served with a notice that my rights as a parent were being terminated; when I found out that she had married Jeffries and they were going to give my children his name.
When I realized what they had done to me, then I saw everything in a different light. Looks, words, gestures took on a whole new meaning. The way they kissed each other when we said goodbye, the way he touched her—things I thought showed how fond he was of her—now showed me, when I remembered them, how much they wanted each other, how hard it was for them to keep their hands off each other.” His mouth curled down in disdain.
“I discovered, you see, that the past was not what I had thought it was. They changed it,” he added, as he moved his hand from his knee to the arm of the chair and again sat straight up.
“And what did you do then, when you realized that you had been betrayed?”
His eyes were cold, hard, mocking. “I thought about it.” He paused and inclined his head slightly to the side. “Does that surprise you? That I thought about it?” He shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands. “What else was I going to do?” He leaned forward again and with a riveting glance suddenly beat his open hand on the wooden arm of the chair. “What else could I do?”
he shouted. “I’d been declared insane—I was living in an asylum, for God’s sake—what else was I going to do but think about it?
That’s all I’ve done for twelve years—think about it!”
“About what they had done to you?”
“Yes.”
“About what you were going to do to them?” I asked, trying to goad him into an admission I could use.
His head, rigid and erect, began to shudder and his eyes flashed with contempt. Then it stopped. “I thought about a lot of things,”
he said, the only expression left a smile so small I could barely see it just under his mustache at the corner of his mouth. “It did occur to me, I must admit,” he said, his voice hoarse and gut-tural, “that by having me declared insane they had also conferred upon me absolute immunity for any otherwise criminal acts I might care to commit.”
For the first time since he had taken the stand, he turned his head and looked at the jury. “I was a lawyer once,” he explained with a polite smile that was so close to the way Judge Bingham habitually acknowledged their presence, I wondered if it was deliberate.
He seemed to forget what he had wanted to say. “Gave you absolute immunity,” I reminded him.
“Yes,” he said, his eyes coming back around to me. “As you can imagine, with that thought I began to imagine all sorts of things. I was insane—the state said so—and no one would ever be able to hold me responsible for anything I did.” A shrewd glint came into his eyes. “In that sense—and maybe not just in that sense—I was like Calvin Jeffries, wasn’t I? Above, or at least outside, the law. Isn’t that what everyone wants? To do anything they want and not have to face any consequences for it?”
Pausing, he started to look around the courtroom again. “Do you still like doing this?” he asked, a pensive expression on his face. “Being a lawyer, trying cases in court? I should have listened to you when you tried to warn me about Jeffries,” he said, biting his lip while his eyes flared open. His mind was starting to wander back to the beginning of what had happened to him. “This was always where I wanted to end up,” he said, looking at me as he narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “In court, trying to convince a jury that I was right.”
He seemed to draw into himself. I moved down the length of the counsel table and stood at the end of it, closest both to the jury box and the witness stand. I pointed at Danny.
“Elliott,” I said quietly, “you’ve never seen him before, have you?”
He did not hear me, or if he did, he chose not to answer.
Whatever was go
ing on in his tortured mind, he was now a prisoner to it. His eyes grew larger and even more intense, his neck bulged, and his shirt collar, too tight as it was, cut into his throat and his face turned red.
“Insanity confers immunity, but immunity is irrelevant when it is a question of self-defense,” he said, the words tumbling rapidly out of his mouth. “You’re entitled to take another’s life when they’re trying to take yours, aren’t you?” he asked, challenging me to disagree.
“Do you know him? Have you ever seen him before?” I asked insistently, pointing again at Danny.
Elliott glanced at the defendant, then looked back at me. “No, I’ve never seen him before,” he said impatiently. “It would be self-defense, wouldn’t it?”
“No,” I replied, keeping my voice low. “It could not be self-defense. No one tried to kill you. But even if they had, it was twelve years ago.”
It was an odd sensation. For a moment I thought we were repeating a conversation we had had before, one of the hundreds we had had when he was an associate in the firm and we talked about the criminal law and the various and sometimes inventive defenses that could be raised to a charge of murder.
“Self-defense has to be contemporaneous with the attack. Otherwise there’s nothing to defend against. You can’t just take the life of someone who injured you at some point in the past. That’s nothing more than revenge.”
He could barely wait for me to finish. “Are you sure?” he asked, his eyes ablaze. “What if, as soon as he was attacked, he started to defend himself—but moved slowly. What if,” he continued, thrusting his head forward, “the attack itself went on—day after day—for years? What if someone was crushing the life out of him, strangling him, a little tighter all the time, with the thought of what he was doing with his wife, with his children? And then, years after it started, he finally makes it stop. Are you so certain that would not be self-defense?”
I refused to concede anything. “No, it isn’t self-defense and you know it. You’re talking about the way you felt, about the effect of what Calvin Jeffries did to you. It wasn’t self-defense, because it was too late—far too late—to prevent him from doing what he did, and because you can’t change the past. All you could do was try to take your revenge. And that’s what you did, wasn’t it, Elliott?”
He was beside himself. “Can’t change the past? Don’t you understand anything? The past is the only thing you can change!”
His eyes were growing wider and his voice was becoming louder, more violent, with every word he spoke. He was close to going completely over the edge. I had to get him to admit what he had done now or it was going to be too late. I took a step toward him.
“You thought by having Calvin Jeffries killed, by having Quincy Griswald killed, you could change the past?”
“Of course!” he insisted. “They changed my past, didn’t they?”
His eyes darted toward the jury. “My wife—the woman I loved—
became the woman who betrayed me. My children—the children I loved—became the children who forgot me. Don’t you see? My past was that of a man who was loved; it became that of a man who was hated and abandoned.”
His head jerked back around until he was again staring straight at me. “Can’t change the past? What would my past be now if I had just lived all those years in the asylum, a patient in the hospital for the criminally insane? What would you see, looking back on my life? A lunatic. And what would you have seen,” he asked, bristling, “when you looked back at the life of Jeffries and Griswald and the mother of my children? Whatever you would have seen, it isn’t what you see now, is it? Can’t change the past? They did it to me, and I did it to them. They tried to write the history of my life, but I wrote theirs instead!” he shouted, rising from the chair.
The judge exchanged a quick, worried glance with the bailiff, who immediately started to move toward the witness stand.
“It’s all right, Elliott,” I said, trying to calm him as I moved another step forward. The bailiff looked at me, then looked at the judge. Bingham hesitated, then held up his hand to let him know he could stop.
I was not through with Elliott yet. There was something more I had to have.
“How did you do it? How did you get Jacob Whittaker to kill Jeffries? How did you get Chester—Billy—to kill Griswald? How did you talk them into doing it?”
He looked at me like I was a fool. “I gave them something to live for. I gave them something to die for. I gave them something to believe in.”
“What did you give them to believe in, Elliott? What did they believe in so much they were willing to kill for it?”
“They believed that evil really exists, that evil people really exist, and that if you don’t stop them they’ll keep doing evil things.” He paused and a smile crept across his mouth. “They’re insane, remember?”
Our eyes were locked together. I took another step toward him.
We were now not more than an arm’s length apart.
“You admit you ordered them to kill Jeffries and Griswald?”
He laughed. “Ordered them? I didn’t order anyone to do anything. We had a trial, just like you’re having now.” He looked around the courtroom. “Or perhaps more like the court proceeding they held when they had me committed. I made my case the way any good lawyer would: I was clear, logical, and persuasive, just the way you are. And then, at the end of it, they reached a verdict, and after they reached a verdict they passed sentence.
They carried it out. I had nothing to do with it.”
His eyes glittered with self-satisfaction, but he was not finished yet. There was something more he wanted to say, something important.
“So you see,” he began, “I did change the past.”
That is when it happened, that dreadful, pathetic beating together of same-sounding words, worse—far worse—than when I had heard it before.
“I did change the past … last … fast … mast.” The words came in short staccato bursts, faster and faster. He began to choke, and he tore at his collar, pulling it away from his throat as if that was what was blocking his breath. His eyes bulging, he tugged at his collar harder and harder as he staggered off the witness chair, stumbled and started to fall. I caught him with both hands and as I fell back under his weight the bailiff rushed in to help.
He must have dreamed about it, seen it in his sleep, gone over it a thousand times in his mind, planning every motion of his hands, every movement of his feet, until it had all become as instinctive as a dance. I was right there, holding him, trying to help him, and I never saw it happen. Suddenly, I was clutching at nothing and Elliott was standing free, waving the bailiff’s gun.
“Quiet!” he demanded as the courtroom dissolved into chaos.
“Quiet!” he shouted again, but panic had taken over. People who had come to watch were trying to hide, throwing themselves onto the floor between the benches, some on top of others who had gotten there first. Elliott aimed the gun toward the back and fired off a round. Everyone froze.
“Now,” he said, holding the gun steady, “I want everyone to listen to me very carefully.” His voice was surprisingly calm. “Very slowly, and starting with the first row, I want everyone to leave—
everyone sitting out there,” he said, nodding toward the spectators’ benches. “Now,” he said. “Very slowly, just like you were leaving church after a wedding or a funeral. One row at a time.”
They did as he told them, one row at a time, looking back at him, afraid he might change his mind before they got out the door. When they were all gone, he turned to the twelve terrified people in the jury box. Gesturing with the gun, he ordered them into the jury room.
“You go with them,” he said, nodding at both the court clerk and the court reporter.
When they were out of the room, he turned to the bailiff and ordered him to take the defendant back to the jail.
“Go with him, Danny,” I said when he appeared reluctant to leave me alone.
There
were only three of us left: Bingham, Loescher, and me—
the judge, the prosecutor, and the defense attorney.
Elliott moved across the front of the courtroom and leaned against the empty jury box, the gun dangling down from his hand.
“Shall we bring the jury back in and have a trial of our own?”
Elliott asked, looking at Loescher. “Or do you think I’ve ade-quately prosecuted the case against Calvin Jeffries and my wife?”
Cassandra Loescher was one of the few who had not panicked when Elliott began brandishing the gun. She had risen straight to her feet and stayed there, glaring at him as if he had offered an insult instead of a threat to her life. She refused to answer, and when he repeated the question her only response was to look at him with even greater contempt.
Her silence made him angry and I tried to get his attention.
“What do you want, Elliott?” I asked, taking a tentative first step in his direction. He warned me away with his eyes.
“You can’t get out of here,” I told him, trying to sound calm and self-assured. “And even if you could, what then? Would you go kill your wife? Is that what this was all about—to get out of the hospital so you could kill her yourself?”
“Kill her?” he exclaimed feverishly. “I don’t want her to die; I want her to live forever. I told you all before,” he cried, as he waved the gun in the air, a dark, menacing look in his eyes. “I came to court to make the record, the record of what happened, the way you do when you want to appeal a case you should never have lost. Kill her? I want her to live knowing that everyone knows what she is and what she did!”
I was too angry, too tired, too worn out by everything that had happened to feel any fear.
“Then why are you doing this? You made your record—you changed the past. Everyone knows. What else is left to do?”
His eyes were on fire. “To finish what I started twelve years ago.”
“What you started … ?”
“When I came to your office that day, when I was going to …”
Then I knew, not just what he was going to do, but what he had always intended to do, and in a strange way it made sense.